Imperishable Inheritance

Can the ‘Christ’ Be Kept in Christmas?

Every year, I boy­cott the local store that trots out its Christ­mas doo­dads first. It starts ear­lier every year. This year it was Octo­ber 4th. As a Chris­t­ian, I believe Jesus was God’s way of walk­ing the Earth. If that’s any­where close to true, then he’s really the wrong per­son to triv­i­al­ize, so I object to hav­ing him pros­ti­tuted by mar­keters; hence the boycott.

I’m not fight­ing the com­mer­cial­iza­tion of Christ­mas; that fight was lost ages ago. What I’m after is more rad­i­cal: Dis­en­tan­gling Jesus entirely from this blight on his good name. I’m out to change the bumper sticker from ‘Keep Christ in Christ­mas’ to ‘Free Christ from Christmas.’

Heresy? Well, com­pare Christ­mas with Mar­tin Luther King’s birth­day. On his birth­day, nobody ever pays any atten­tion to his birth. Instead, it’s ‘I have a dream’ and his impact on soci­ety. We mark Dr. King’s birth by focus­ing on what he said and did as an adult. Christ­mas, by con­trast, has no time for what the adult Jesus said and did. Christ­mas keeps him safely shut up as a baby in the manger, where he can’t make his usual noise about peo­ple repent­ing and liv­ing a godly life.

So does his birth mat­ter at all? Well, it mat­ters to his fol­low­ers today as one way of back­ing up his claim to be the son of God. But that’s not the way Jesus, him­self, backed up his claim. He pointed not to his birth, but to his Res­ur­rec­tion. So I’ll trade a month of Christ­mases for one mean­ing­ful Easter.

When Jesus denounced hypocrisy, he wasn’t talk­ing about say­ing one thing and doing some­thing else; he was talk­ing about using God and the things of God as a means to some other end, like, oh, say, mak­ing a buck. This is why he drove the mon­ey­chang­ers out of the tem­ple. We do him no honor by cart­ing him out once a year to stand him on his head.

I’m not propos­ing that we can­cel Christ­mas. I know, the econ­omy would col­lapse with­out it. Fine. Keep the gift-giving and the jin­gle bells. Let’s just sub­tract the remain­ing Jesus ele­ment from it and move that over into Easter. Call Decem­ber 25th Sol­stice. Call it Retail Day. Call it Hol­i­day Num­ber Nine. I don’t care, just leave Christ out of it. He was not born to be the patron saint of fourth-quarter earnings.